Beyond the Patio

Going Beyond the Mind that You Have Acquired
Matthew 3:1-12

In the Gospel today we have a picture of John the Baptist. I think of the story of a minister who had visited a family quite a few times in a short period of time. The children had reached the point of recognizing the minister but weren’t sure as to how to refer to him. He came to the door one evening and one of the children answered the door then shouted to her parents, “Mom and Dad that man is here again!” Every Advent I want to say the same thing when I read passages about John the Baptist, “That man is here again!”

John leaps on the stage today and you have the distinct feeling that this is all in preparation for something greater to happen immediately.  There was an experience just around the corner that had the power to transform people’s lives. How were the people to prepare for such a happening?

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming,

 “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

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How do we prepare for the coming of the Christ into our lives? 

John said, “Repent”. Repentance is an interesting term. To repent means of course “to turn around”, “to change”. The word in Greek is metanoia which is from the same root as metamorphis — to change to be transformed. I was intrigued by what Marcus Borg points out in his most recent book, The Heart of Christianity. He says:

And repentance in the New Testament has an additional nuance of meaning.  The Greek roots of the word combine to mean,  “go beyond the mind that you have”. Go beyond the mind that you have been given and acquired.  Go beyond the mind shaped by the culture to the mind that you have “in Christ”(1)

Yes! I think that if we are going to follow Christ’s way of life  in the world today we do have to go beyond the mind that we have acquired.

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What is the nature of the culture that has shaped our minds?  

(1) We live in culture dominated by ME. I’m number one. This is not the same as having good self-esteem. Everyone needs self esteem. Everyone needs to know their strengths as well as their weaknesses. However, when ME (number one) dominates everything we say and do, when our SELF is won at the expense of others, then we are in some kind of bondage to ourselves. .It saps all our energy because we have to keep putting ourselves forward by putting others down and we have to keep proving that we are the best but it never seems like we have ever “made it”.

(2) We also live in a culture dominated by consumption and consumerism, which besets us and holds us in a kind of prison. It is like the unending of death valley. It goes on and on and never satisfies our thirst.

There comes a time that we realize all those things do not satisfy — they don’t bring us any more happiness. But we keep on doing trying to gather more and more around us as if possessed. We are like one of  the self-indulging characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald books that says “We took what we wanted until we no longer wanted what we took.” or like a poor, male patient in a large mid-western county hospital, covered with dermatitis as the result of venereal disease, saying to the chaplain, “Reverend, my trouble is that I’ve been led around by my ‘gotta haves’ all my life. (quoted by Charles Caroll in The New Gnosticism, p. 38).  Then there is a story about a young man who was proposing to a girl. He said to her: “I am not wealthy and I don t have a yacht and a convertible like Jerome Green, but, my darling, I love you.” The girl thought for a moment and then replied: “And I love you, too; but tell me a little more about Jerome Green.” 

These are all examples of how our minds are molded by the culture in which we live.

The good news is that we can move beyond the mind that we have acquired. John the Baptist is saying YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE BOUND BY THE KIND OF WORLD IN WHICH YOU LIVE. You can change. The world can change. There is power to change. So his message of repentance is really good news.

As Elie Wiesel wrote :

When God created man, God gave him a secret – and that secret was not how to begin but how to begin again….it is not given to man to begin; that privilege is God’s alone.  But it is given to man to begin again – and he does so every time he chooses to defy death and side with the living.” (2)

So the season of Advent is another call to begin again and to choose life. 

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How do we do that? I believe that it is in the way we deal with the ordinary circumstances of our lives.

When I think of finding spiritual presence in the ordinary circumstances of our lives one Christmas stands in my memory.  It  was the first year that Paula and I were married ( 29 years ago) and we moved into a new parish in a small community of Killarney Manitoba on the 14th of December having left my position at the national office of our church in Toronto. We didn’t know whether our furniture would arrive before Christmas because snowstorms held up the moving van somewhere in Northern Ontario. We were invited to stay in the home of one of the parishioner for a few days.   Through their great generosity they had invited us to stay with them until our furniture arrived but we were determined to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in our new home even if our house goods did not arrive in time.  We put up a tree and decorated it with some Christmas lights and ornaments borrowed from our hosts. All that was in the house for awhile was this decorated Christmas tree in the corner of the living room. 

Our furniture did finally arrive on December 23rd but needless to say we were still surrounded by unpacked boxes on Christmas Day.  We didn’t have time to shop in the weeks before Christmas so we spent two hours on the day before Christmas in the city of Brandon doing our Christmas shopping. We bought a few simple little things for each other. The parish had been without a rector for several months so had just planned the simplest schedule — one service Christmas Eve. So Paula and I were alone for Christmas Day with no family or close friends around us. The people of the parish were kind and we were invited out for Christmas dinner but we chose to spend our first Christmas as a married couple together by ourselves. The people had brought over all kinds of home baking and preserves with the recipes attached to every item.  They had everything in the box that we needed for a Christmas dinner.

We opened our gifts from one another on Christmas morning and then spend some time quietly enjoying each other’s company.  In the late morning we went for a walk in the fresh fallen snow and then we decided to visit the hospital. There weren’t very many people there but we did visit all of those who were there including two people from our parish. We celebrated communion with whoever wanted to join us. One person in the hospital at that time I was to visit frequently in the hospital and nursing home for the next four years. Back home we prepared and ate our Christmas dinner together and then went out to some parishioners for dessert. I remember that day so vividly because I experienced God’s presence so significantly without any hype or fanfare. 

Certainly we were warmed by the generosity of the people in that community but it was more than that.  It was in the mere simplicity of that day that I experienced a great spiritual awakening.  A sense of peace enveloped us throughout the whole day, through the quiet time in the morning, the walk in the snow, the visit to the hospital, the quiet supper together, and the sharing of time with another family after supper.  It was the peace that can only be described as “the peace that passes all understanding”.  It was a peace that cannot be engineered.  You can’t make it happen.  No matter how hard you try through the multiplicity of things you do during the Christmas season you cannot capture it. All you can do is be open to it and be aware of it when you do experience it happening. It comes like Christ came into the world at his birth as a pure act of God’s Grace. That sense of peace that was given that day was to carry us through many days, weeks, and months to follow.

Great spiritual unity is often is experienced in the “ordinary”.  It could be the midst of worship, at the communion rail, in the singing of a certain hymn, or in listening to some music at home.  It could be in our silence. It could also be at the supper table. It could be in some common event that opens our hearts.  It could be in sickness. I have known some people who after a heart attack or some other illness or a “near death experience” has a totally difference view of life. Sometimes it takes place in the midst of a conversation, watching TV or at the kitchen sink.  Sometimes we experience that connectedness, that sense of oneness with life itself just in the way that other people touch our lives. It can be that simple.

We don’t have to live with the expectation that something spectacular has to happen for the season to have a special meaning for us. We don’t need live by “the gotta haves” to give us a sense of fulfillment.  We don’t need to run around frantically doing all kinds of things to make Christmas happen. We don’t  have to involve ourselves in a multiplicity of activities to ensure that WE get the “right feeling” for the Christmas season. It is in simplicity and reflecting upon the common everyday occurrences in our life that we can begin to open our minds and go beyond the mind that we have been given, that is, the mind that has been nurtured by culture in which we live.  If we are able to do that,  Advent and Christmas season will most surely be a transforming experience.

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(1) Marcus J. Borg The Heart Of Christianity, Rediscovering a life of Faith,  Harper Collins, New York, NY 2003 p. 180

(2) Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God   Random House, New York:, 1976 p. 32